Chapter 28: Protogenus

Why I was brought to Belial, King of the Blessed, I did not at first understand, and when I passed between the rows of statues leading to his throne it seemed that their eyes were following me. They looked almost like trees, their bark worn smooth as bone and buffed to a fine polish. From their backs sprouted great branches that arched like spread wings. Their arms were folded across their chests and their heads were looking upward. Again, it seemed that their eyes strained to follow me, but they were well over twenty feet tall, so I thought myself mistaken.

Belial's audience chamber was on a massive platform that was both braced from below and suspended from above. Behind the throne, the outer wall of the tower was covered in a grim mural of targs displaying various forms of dominance over other sentient creatures.

Belial was a beast of uncertain make. Half the height of a giant, with a broad frame and long, slender limbs, he was a gaunt creature wrapped in grey, parchment-like skin; a pillar of wasteful scorn. His pinched face was deeply carved and framed by stringy locks of colorless hair that looked at all times wet.

They had brought me up from below through an ovular door in an antechamber two levels down. The stair they led me up at spearpoint was narrow, with the rails torn completely off. A daring glance over my shoulder revealed my captors were tied off to harnesses that linked to a long cable hung over the stair. I chanced a look downward, which I regretted. Beneath me was a fall into pure oblivion, lest I find myself skewered on a broken piece of scaffolding. We rounded the final stretch, and having survived several attempts by my guards to prod me into falling, I saw the parapet of mortal flesh stretched over Belial and his hideous court.

I have not yet described the targs in much detail. This is in part due to their fiendish speed and furtive nature. On the ground level, they only stood still to brand or to gloat. But I saw them there, gathered to do both to me in obeisance to their wretched sovereign. They were men and women of varied kindreds, along with a horde of naked children weilding barbed whips. Their clothing was a patchwork of pilfered gear, with certain marks uniting what I took to be their social castes.

The wild, fearful drudges wore leather masks that completely covered head and face, with round, bugged out mesh goggles to see through, and a small mimicry of a prison door over their mouths. Below their masks were metal collars with hooks to link a chain to, and their trousers had the fabric over their buttocks' cut away. The middle ranks wore a motley of outfits and marks ranging from scarves that covered their mouths and jaws, to spiked caps with chains that attached to iron belts that covered their loins as did an infant's diaper. Above them were the soldiers, the type seen in surface raids, whose clothing was of stout fabrics with patches of scavenged armor, and standing astride Belial's throne were a heirodulic order in matching robes. With each gust of the wind their robes swayed, and I saw that their trousers underneath left their groins exposed. These animals sickened me.

The whole place radiated a stifling warmth that warred with the frigid, outside air and howling tower winds. Tall rushlight pillars were the only comfort here, battling at least against the cold. I honestly was beginning to envy the targs for their facial coverings, as the stink of Tarthas and its many poisons stung at my eyes and nostrils. Belial himself wore only tattered robes of stained ermine and faded purple. On his vacant head was an old iron crown, brittle with rust. I looked intently at him with a shadow of pity, and a blistering Sunray of disgust.

I was pushed down to my knees, and sat there for no less than an hour as they spat on me, struck me, waved their anuses in my face and threatened me with a dozen different forms of rape. Two men nearly as white as me emerged from a pair of doors on either side of the throne, each carrying a roll of crimson cloth, and they were cheered on as they approached. One man was tall and fat with a clammy sheen of sweat on his shaved pate, the other was short and emaciated, with blue veined skin almost as thin as Belial's. The crowd went wild, banging the floor with clubs and rattling clusters of bones in the air, and the two men unrolled their cloth rolls on the ground in front of me. I was not intimidated by the implements of torture they proudly revealed. I had used surgical tools as a child that were far more frightening. All I felt was a churning in my stomach over the depraved inclination of these fiends, and a hatred towards them for threatening to keep me from my love. In their idiocy they had not searched my clothing, and they tied my hands behind my back where I could reach an explosive satchel in the rear pack on my battle belt.

Something stopped my hands from twisting free the activation latch on the satchel, and Makore was then brought up and pushed down at my side, along with one other of our unit. The cheering became deafening, until silenced by the loud toll of an unseen bell. Gathered in the throng of targs were crazed humans, enraged tarrasquin, darklit luciens, four armed antagarthans, and tyflochs with their wings either docked or bound. Now, from a third door directly behind the throne, strode an ennui, one of the few I've ever seen. They are the androgenics, those who mate outside the body, sending their spores to mingle in the air when they gather at times appointed by their blood, before turning their backs to their kin and returning to their lonely proclivities. They were named, I think, by people who had no interest in understanding their alien ways, because I have learned that they do indeed have passions, though they rarely show them in ways that copulating kindreds can recognize.

This ennui was well over seven feet tall, its torso so willowy it seemed a tree put into motion. Its skin shimmered with the glowing throb of the rushlights, prismatic iridescence cascading up and down its smooth, muscular body. It lowered its long and graceful neck to peer closely into our eyes, and on its breath I smelt a faint scent not unlike bile. White slitted eyes blinked sideways, and a long, thin finger caressed my cheek. I held the satchel latch between my thumbs, ready to let it blow. I thought to myself that I might not live to see my love again, but I would rather see the sky go completely dark than let her live any longer under the shadow of the targs. But I had no chance to loosen the latch, as the ennui lifted me to my feet and pushed me ahead of it to stand before Belial, and as we walked up the steps to the king's dais, I felt filth covered hands reach between mine to take away my explosive charge. Once before Belial, the ennui held me in the air as a proud father does his infant son, then sang in a trilling tone that woke the half dead king.

Belial blinked painfully at first, then clutched the arms of his throne. His fingers looked like cracked stone, but I could see the arms of his throne flex under the surprising strength of his tired palms. He seemed almost crow-like up close. His long, gangly arms looked to be missing their plumage, his narrow jaw jutted like a beak, rotting teeth broke the flow of his drool and his bony toes had nails like talons.

The ennui set me down, then went to his king's side and stroked his head with mocking caresses, and the thought struck me that this old king had long since outlived his wits, leaving his broken realm under the rule of his adjutant. The ennui kept running its fingers through Belial's damp, matted hair until he raised his head. It then leaned close to him, lifted his hair from over his eyes, and pointed a long finger at me. Ennui mouths open in the manner of a worm's, so I could not read its lips, but its whisper rode on a gust of wind, saying a word I wished I could forget.

Belial lurched forward, but his stare remained lifeless. The ennui hissed for a soldier to pull back my hood. When one did, Belial's eyes flickered to life as lanterns do when riverboats are swallowed by fog. Silence then permeated around me, one targ at a time, and while I stood a fair number of paces away, I swear I could feel the thumping of the king's heart. I will never forget the look on his necrotic face with its limp hanging jaw, as understanding of some terrible thing seeped into his spongy brain. He leaned further forward until he slipped off his throne onto his hands and knees, all four of his limbs quaking. His crown slumped to one side and thudded onto the ground, and still the silence drowned all sounds but his slow heart, as if the noise of the world were a flame, and his heartbeat a heavy woolen blanket thrown to steal its breath. When Belial broke the quiet, it was with an agonizing scream that frightened me to tears.

White light glinted off his eyes as he came close to me, gripping me under my armpits with his huge fingers. His face kept creeping closer to mine, and I vomited from the stench of his hot, putrefied breath. He paid no notice to my retching, but kept peering closer until I feared I was going to be devoured, when at last I saw the true color of his eyes. They were faded from generations of misery, but deep beneath their grey film was a dim glow of blue. I was staring at two icy gems buried under centuries of calcification.

He screamed again while rising to his full height, his bones creaking with the sound of attic stairs being climbed at night. He held me up above his head, and for an instant I could see the whole crowd beneath me. Makore had been dragged away while a herd of dredges tore the last conscript to ribbons. I saw Makore looking at me with unfeeling eyes before he came rocketing towards me with startling speed. The first time Belial slammed me onto the ground broke my jaw and half of my ribs. The second snapped my spine. I didn't feel the third, fourth, fifth or sixth. I awoke in a musty jail cell next to a terrified Makore. The ennui was outside in the hall, looking through the bars with a smile in its glassy eyes.

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